The container was never getting its configuration, so it started with nothing
set and Traefik reported a Bad Gateway on every route.
Dokploy writes its own .env into the build context from the service's
Environment tab AFTER cloning the repository. That tab is empty, so it wrote a
zero-byte file over the committed one, and `COPY .env .` faithfully copied the
empty result into the image. The checkout showed it exactly: every file
timestamped 08:33, and .env alone at 08:34 with a size of 0. Inside the running
container, /app/.env was 0 bytes.
Nothing about this is visible from the outside. The build log shows the COPY
succeeding, the image is produced, and the platform reports only a 502.
Dokploy does not manage .env.production, so the config now travels under that
name and the Dockerfile copies it to /app/.env in the image. Anything set in the
Environment tab still wins at runtime, because settings.py calls load_dotenv()
without override=True.
Verified by reconstructing the build context the way Dokploy does - git archive
of HEAD, then an empty .env written over it - applying .dockerignore and the
COPY lines, and booting the result with an empty environment: /app/.env is 4938
bytes, the sign-in passwords are absent, and scripts/check_deploy.sh reports 6
passed, 0 failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
